The Department of Justice notified Congress in March that they had reopened the Emmett Till murder case after Carolyn Bryant disclosed that her testimony was falsified. Jerry Mitchell reports.
USA TODAY

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reopening the Emmett Till case. I hope he'll get justice for Till, but his shaky civil rights record raises doubts.

Emmett Till's photo is seen on his grave marker in Alsip, Ill. Till's killing was a galva- nizing event in the civil rights movement. Emmett Till's photo is seen on his grave marker in Alsip, Ill. Till's killing was a galvanizing event in the civil rights movement.(Photo: Robert A. Davis/AP)

Carolyn Bryant, the white woman whose kinsmen lynched 14-year-old Emmett Till, admitted to me that she had borne false witness at their murder trial. Her testimony depicted something tantamount to a rape attempt.

"This n***** man," she testified, chased her behind the counter and pinned her at the register. He clutched her around the waist, and spewed filth to her about sex with white women. Just as she broke free, "this other n***** came in the store" and hauled Emmett out. Carolyn then stomped outside through the black boys gathered out front and pulled a pistol from beneath the front seat of a car. As she did so, Carolyn testified, Emmett whistled at her.

"That part" — the physical and sexual parts — "wasn't true," she told me. Since lying on the stand in 1955, Carolyn had not uttered a public word until our interview.

Neither her perjury nor Justice's reopening of the case seemed breaking news to me. I had seen her lawyer’s notes, penned five days after the murder, which record that Carolyn told him the boy “insulted” her. Nothing more.

Seven witnesses endured the terror when Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam barged Emmett's great-aunt and great-uncle's house with pistols at 2:30 a.m. and ranted about the boy “that done the talking up at Money.” No mention of assault. If these brutes had thought Emmett laid hands on Roy's wife, would they have failed to bring it up and instead focused on any "talking" he might have done?

In 2007, a racially-mixed Mississippi grand jury sifted the vast evidence and voted 19-0 not to indict Carolyn. District Attorney Joyce Chiles, a local black woman, shared their "rage,” but praised the jurors for avoiding conclusions “based solely on emotion.”

An FBI agent called two months after my book came out to say that Justice planned to reopen the case. I made it clear that I supported any possible justice for the Till family and sent the DOJ my research. I also expressed suspicion about the attorney general’s striking conversion to the cause of racial justice.

Sessions' shaky record on racial justice

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ record on civil rights justifies doubt. As a U.S. attorney, Sessions long battled a court order that mandated equal funding for re-segregated black schools.

I sent Justice my research over a year ago, but only now, beset by outrage at their detainment of immigrant children without clear plans to reunite them with their parents, did the Trump administration launch this civil rights charade. Their attack on voting rights persists. What better billboard to shore up the brand than the most notorious racist crime in American history?

Justice for Till means joining the struggle

Regardless of why Sessions reopens this case — I hope yet unseen evidence justifies it — America must never forget the lynching of Emmett Till. Three days after the Milam-Bryant clan tortured Emmett to death and rolled him into the Tallahatchie River, his bloated corpse rose to confront our nation’s broken moral compass. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, examined his gouged-out eye, clipped ear, shattered skull, and insisted on an open-casket funeral to “let the people see what they did to my boy.”

Mrs. Till-Mobley then did something all but unimaginable at the time — she and her allies leveraged the power of black Chicago’s community institutions to organize a multicolored coalition that helped win the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, create a new black sense of self and set ablaze a compelling vision of democratic possibility. Her boy’s name still echoes in our streets where those who protest police violence against African Americans chant: “Tamir Rice, Emmett Till/How many black kids will you kill?”

Justice for Emmett Till in the narrow sense seems unlikely. The best way to win justice for him now is to join the struggle that his mother prayed would give this horror meaning, “Lord, take my soul,” she pleaded beside his casket, “show me what you want me to do and make me able to do it.”

Timothy Tyson is senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and author of “The Blood of Emmett Till” (2017). This column first appeared in the Detroit Free Press.